October 2016

Lenovo today announced Unified Workspace Cloud, a hosted workspace solution, that will be unveiled at the Lenovo Software booth at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Orlando, Florida, October 16 to 20. Unified Workspace Cloud enables businesses to drive productivity, innovation, and profitability by providing employees with simplified access to their complete portfolio of applications and content via single sign-on, on any device, anytime, anywhere.

Technology Drives Retention and Agility

Businesses and CIOs today are frequently turning to technology policies and tools that help achieve a more flexible, agile and secure working environment in response to challenges related to attracting, engaging and retaining top talent:

Dell EMC is unveiling new software and a new generation of Dell EMC Data Domain protection storage systems that are flash-enabled to deliver industry-leading speed and scalability as well as enhanced protection for virtual environments. These new systems also provide the ultimate in efficiency for tiering long-term retention data to the cloud.

The deployment of the new Data Domain Cloud Tier software within Data Domain increases the total volume of data that can be managed through a single appliance by 200 percent, with a maximum logical capacity of 150PB. Data Domain Cloud Tier establishes Data Domain as the only protection storage to natively tier de-duplicated data to public, private, or hybrid clouds for long-term retention, including Dell EMC Elastic Cloud Storage and Virtustream Storage Cloud.

A survey recently conducted by Heavy Reading reveals that 85.8 percent of telecom respondents consider OpenStack to be essential or important to their success. The survey, commissioned by the OpenStack Foundation, explores current usage and adoption plans of communications service providers (CSPs) particularly with respect to NFV, 5G, IoT and enterprise cloud. Attend a webinar hosted by Heavy Reading senior analyst Roz Roseboro on November 9 for a deep dive into the survey results, and hear directly from telecoms at the OpenStack Summit Barcelona, October 25-28, 2016.

Aimed at existing and new customers alike, InfiniteProtect 2.0 enables users to back up files safely and easily — and retain them indefinitely — from anywhere in the world, based on any schedule they choose. InfiniteProtect 2.0 can perform synthetic full backups of Windows Servers, Windows computers, NAS devices, mobile computers, Exchange Servers and SQL Servers, along with entire Hyper-V and VMware hosts — seamlessly, with one transaction. First introduced in 2015, InfiniteProtect 1.0 earned earned the highest rating of “Enterprise-Ready” in Skyhigh Networks’ CloudTrust Program.

Hitachi Data Systems, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd., today announced three new ways to improve and accelerate digital transformation initiatives. Current market offerings lack flexibility and choice for customers, forcing IT to face on their own a gauntlet of obstacles and dead ends. To address this, Hitachi Data Systems has introduced:

Hitachi Management Automation Strategy, which helps organizations simplify the management of their infrastructure.

Enhancements to Hitachi Unified Compute Platform (UCP) 2000 and UCP HC for organizations that want to transform and modernize their IT infrastructure with economical and open converged and hyperconverged systems.

Blue Medora, a cloud and database management software startup based in Grand Rapids, Mich., recently closed on a Series B funding round of $8.6 million, led by St. Louis-based Lewis & Clark Ventures. In a statement the company said the fresh investment will be used to expand more sales, marketing and development in cloud environments.

Blue Medora completed its Series A for $4.6 million in 2015, and current investors VMware, Inc., eLab Ventures, Start Garden and Grand Angels also supported the series B. The total capital raised since the company's inception is up to $14.5 million.

Serverless, Inc., creators of the Serverless Framework, which enables companies to build web, mobile and IoT applications comprised of cloud services that scale automatically, has secured $3 million in seed funding led by Trinity Ventures. The funds will further Serverless’ mission to help its users spend less time operating complex infrastructure and more time delivering results.

In addition, Serverless, Inc. has brought Serverless Framework V1.0 out of beta. The Framework’s beta has seen massive interest from the open-source community and has racked up more than 11,000 GitHub stars in one year. It leverages new, event-driven compute services, like Amazon Web Services’ Lambda, to deploy applications that scale continuously and bill their owner only when they run. After being tested by hundreds of startup and enterprise companies, the Serverless Framework is ready for production.

iland, an award-winning enterprise cloud infrastructure provider, today announced that Oceanscan is leveraging iland's Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) with Veeam Software and advanced security to ensure continuous availability and 100 percent SLA conformance to its global customer base. Veeam Software is the innovative provider of solutions that delivers Availability for the Always-On Enterprise.

Headquartered in Scotland, Oceanscan is an international equipment company providing advanced technology to the oil and gas, defense, petrochemical, renewables and nuclear industries. With customers across the UK, Middle East, Australia, India and Africa, the company has personnel on-call serving multiple time zones 24/7. Oceanscan was utilising a robust Veeam on-premise IT backup solution, but with the business expanding rapidly and increasing demand for continuous availability, it needed a disaster recovery solution that could ensure near real-time recovery of production systems in the event of a disaster. The ability to match its production network and security was also imperative.

SolarWinds MSP, a global leader in delivering comprehensive, scalable IT service management solutions to MSPs, today announced the rapid integration progress achieved to date, as SolarWinds N-able and LOGICnow officially transition to a unified brand.

SolarWinds MSP offers IT automation, security, and network and service management -- both on-premises and in the cloud. Further differentiating its solutions, SolarWinds MSP leverages data analytics and business intelligence to provide actionable insights that MSPs can use to compete more effectively and better serve their customers.

Tintri, Inc, a leading provider of all-flash VM-aware storage (VAS), today announced the upcoming availability of Synchronous Replication for recovery of mission critical virtualized and cloud applications running on Tintri VMstore arrays. Organizations can now protect all of their mission critical applications from data center failures, and do so with more simplicity and over greater distances than is possible with storage systems from competing vendors. Tintri Synchronous Replication can be set up in minutes by an IT generalist and offers zero-minute recovery point objectives (Zero RPO) with single-click failover for individual virtual machines.

"Until now, organizations that wanted synchronous replication to protect their most critical applications had to use complex and expensive storage, limiting the benefits of zero RPO disaster recovery to those with the largest IT staffs and budgets," said Kieran Harty, Tintri CTO and co-founder. "Today, Tintri announces Synchronous Replication for every organization and every application, with simple set up, one-click failover, plus all the operational and performance advantages of Tintri VAS for virtualized and cloud infrastructures."

Ericsson and Equinix have developed a joint offering for enterprises to deliver the “true benefits” of hybrid cloud and multi cloud adoption. The offering leverages the Equinix Cloud Exchange (ECX) and Apcera platform from Ericsson. The initial target enterprises will be finance and insurance companies in South East Asia and Oceania to help solve their challenges on data compliance and regulation and at the same time give the agility that enterprises need.

The finance and insurance industry have strict compliance regulations on data and this brings limitations for them to deploy a multi-cloud strategy. Ericsson and Equinix’s joint offering will address this challenge by enabling enterprises to deploy any application on any cloud infrastructure with high performance and secure connections that meet compliance regulations...

Everyone knows that technology can help raise your business to the next level. The use of cloud computing and the availability of supporting softwares are making businesses – from small startups to large corporations – strive in the face of evolution. There are so many solutions to choose from as well, particular when it comes to its enterprise-level ERP softwares. These ERP systems can do so much to improve your internal workflows. And if you are wondering how, check out a few reasons why ERP softwares can improve productivity.

Enhanced Clarity

A lot of important business decisions must be made with good, clear information in hand. In the old days, getting the necessary information to make strategic decisions meant gathering paper documents and conduct arduous meetings. Today, however, you can access all the information you need from any internet-enabled device...

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. expects pure e-commerce operators to face ‘tremendous challenges’ as the web giant seeks to tap more growth from transforming China’s $4.5 trillion traditional retail industry. China’s largest e-commerce company plans to upgrade retail businesses and improve efficiency across product manufacturing, distribution and service, Chief Executive Officer Daniel Zhang said in an e-mailed letter to shareholders on Thursday. The company is working with partly-owned Suning Commerce Group Co. and Intime Retail Group Co. to integrate the online experience with brick-and-mortar shopping.

Alibaba has highlighted trillions of dollars in Chinese household savings as a key driver of growth, with the company pledging to keep investing in business and geographical expansion, even if it drags on earnings in the short-term. The company is also looking overseas for growth, as Chairman Jack Ma targets serving 2 billion consumers and supporting 10 million profitable business around the world in 20 years...

Ubuntu, the platform used in the majority of cloud deployments worldwide, today released version 16.10 with hybrid cloud operations, bare-metal cloud performance, the ability to lift-and-shift 80% of Linux VMs to machine containers, Kubernetes for world-leading process-container coordination, full container support in OpenStack, and telco-grade networking latency enhancements.

"The world's fastest hypervisor, LXD, and the world's best cloud operating system, Ubuntu, together with the latest OpenStack and Kubernetes make for the world's fastest and best private cloud infrastructure" said Mark Shuttleworth, who leads Canonical's product team and the Ubuntu project. "Our focus is to enable true hybrid cloud operations, and this release further enhances the tools and platform that most companies depend on to operate effectively across all major public clouds and in one's own data center, from bare metal to cloud container."

Veritas Technologies, the leader in information management, today announced that it will showcase two of its software-defined storage solutions—HyperScale for OpenStack and Veritas Access—at OpenStack Summit in Barcelona, Spain from October 25-28, 2016.

With OpenStack quickly gaining traction as an open source software platform of choice for public and private clouds, storage management and support for enterprise production workloads is becoming critical for the successful adoption of OpenStack. Announced in September at the Veritas Vision 2016 conference, both HyperScale for OpenStack and Veritas Access help ensure reliability, accessibility and high workload performance within OpenStack environments—no matter the scale.

Tips for Your Cloud Architecture Design

These days, it seems like companies are migrating to the cloud. The cloud offers some amazing benefits to companies by creating a way for data and applications to be shared and accessed remotely. However, it's helpful to evaluate the needs of your company prior to making such a large transition. As with most things in life, it's important to make a plan before getting started with your migration.

Cherwell Software, a global leader in IT service management (ITSM) solutions, announced today the availability of the Orchestration Pack for Microsoft Azure on the Cherwell mApp Exchange. Available at no cost to all Cherwell customers, the Orchestration Pack for Azure works seamlessly in tandem with Cherwell Service Management, Cherwell's award-winning ITSM platform, enabling its customers to better manage Azure workloads and VMs.

This Cherwell Service Management Orchestration Pack for Azure enables customers to automate and streamline the service request, provisioning, and change processes for Azure virtual machines (VMs). Users can easily procure and modify Azure VMs using an intuitive self-service portal, and IT departments can apply policies and processes for creating and maintaining VMs. Plus, because requests and changes live within Cherwell Service Management as the system of record, IT teams can track and document the path of work, improving governance while enhancing communications and services to their business users.

Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group, announced recently at its Computing Conference that it will provide its artificial intelligence (AI), deep learning and data analytics capabilities to two new cutting-edge developments in China, demonstrating its role as a leading driver of the country's technological advancements.

Initiated by the Hangzhou government, the “Hangzhou City Brain” is set to address the city’s urban living challenges. As the hub to consolidate data and provide real-time analysis, the “Hangzhou City Brain” will rely on Alibaba Cloud’s AI program “ET” and big data analytics capabilities to perform real-time traffic prediction with its video and image recognition technologies...

Cloud robotics is gaining significant momentum in recent times. Experts believe increasing investments in cloud-based technology will fuel innovations in the robotics sector, which in turn can have a profound impact on the enterprise – leading to cutting edge innovation and increased efficiency at a much lower cost.

Simply put, cloud robotics is about empowering a robot to work beyond its physical ability. In an interaction with the New York Times, Ken Goldberg, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, defines Cloud robotics as a new way of thinking about robots. “For a long time, we thought that robots were off by themselves, with their own processing power...